Tag Archives: Literature

Huatulco

Editor’s Letter

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By Jane Bauer

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

One of my favorite things is to rearrange a room and I have found that many spaces benefit from having things removed rather than added. The trouble is we get so attached to having stuff and having things the way they are.

Even if you don’t consider yourself as someone who concerns themselves with design, most of us add our own signature to a space. Think for a moment about your living room, picture it in your mind if you aren’t there. Visualize each item that you have chosen and ask yourself why? Is it for its sentimental tie to a past event – a display of photographs perhaps? Maybe the object has a practical use – a candy dish, or a foot roller you keep tucked under the couch. Why have you arranged the furniture the way it is – to maximize light or seating faced towards the television set?

What about the colors? Were you intentional as you filled this space or did it become layered over itself with time? What might be taken away? How does the room reflect who you are and your habits?

In this issue our writers explore design. We didn’t limit the topic to home design or architecture or clothing and it was fascinating to see what people came up with. From papel picado, to the clothes we wear to the buildings we spend our lives in, what is clear is that no corner of our lives is untouched by design. Unknowingly, we have each curated our lives, piece by piece over time.

You may not consider yourself a symbol of design but the truth is that we all are. Our style is reflected in our clothes, our haircut, our living room, even the plates we choose to eat our dinner off.

As we approach this commercial season what if instead of adding more stuff to our ever-growing piles, we became intentional about the spaces and objects we already have? Decluttering your space has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety, and lead to greater creativity.

Let’s lighten our load as we vault into 2024!

Huatulco

From Ireland to India: Novels and the Revolutions that Inspired Them

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By Carole Reedy

In hindsight, the stories told of revolutions often seem thrilling. Revolutions themselves are frequently portrayed as virtuous, noble, moral, and/or ethical, and they usually make for exciting reading. In the details, however, lies the reality, which often doesn’t bear out the romance of our perceptions.

Heroes emerge, but there are also the stark realities of revolution, explored in the books selected here. Looking in depth at significant revolutionary figures, famous or not, offers a fresh take on the subject of revolution and those who voluntarily or involuntarily dedicate their lives to a cause.

These highly respected authors have penned unique and well-researched books that mutually illuminate via their distinctive perspectives.

Ireland: A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle (1999)
Doyle’s historical novel is set in Ireland during the 1916 Easter Rising, culminating in the eventual truce signed with the United Kingdom in 1921.

Swashbuckling young Henry Smart tells us his story, from his birth to a poor Irish family through his 20s as a member of the Irish Civil Army. Doyle’s colorful fictional characters are intertwined with the real strugglers for freedom, such as Michael Collins.

This is the first of a trilogy in which Henry escapes to the US in the second book, but returns to Ireland in the third.

Doyle received well-deserved praise for his lyrical composition, though the novels have been criticized for being overly graphic. Personally, I find this exactly the attraction: Doyle’s staccato style full of colorful imagery is the element that not only moves the story but reveals the conjugations of revolution.

Readers can’t help but experience a range of emotions while Doyle enlightens us on Irish history.

France: A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel (1992)
The grave. That is the place of greater safety to which Mantel refers in the title of her all-encompassing 872-page-turner about the French Revolution. She tells the story of the Revolution in the late 18th century through the lens of the three major players, coincidentally all lawyers and friends and all executed by guillotine in the Place de Concorde, Paris, in 1794. At the time of their deaths, none had reached the age of 40.

George Danton was the ambitious young lawyer who has been described by several historians as “the chief force in the overthrow of the French monarchy and the establishment of the First French Republic.”

Camille Desmoulins, the charming conspirator and radical pamphleteer, is best known for his role that led to the storming of the Bastille. Although a schoolmate of Robespierre and Desmoulins as well as Danton, Desmoulins and Danton later distanced themselves from Robespierre, criticizing the excesses of the Revolutionary Government.

Danton and Doumoulins were executed side-by-side on April 5, 1794.

Maximilian Robespierre, slight of stature, diligent, and ironically terrified of violence, is often thought of as the “brains” of the Revolution. His role was complicated, as is the entire period of this history.

Mantel has taken a complex series of events and used these three major figures to weave a cogent and satisfying tale. Instead of simply viewing these powerful intellectuals as revolutionary figures, we see them as men in their relationships with others and among themselves.

Most readers are familiar with the late Mantel’s Wolf Hall series, the trilogy that tells the tale of Thomas Cromwell and the beguiling story of England in the 16th century, complete with the colorful Henry the VIII and Anne Boleyn, just two of the starring personages of the series.

For my part, A Place of Greater Safety is the crème de la crème of all of Mantel’s varied and intriguing novels.

Mexico: The Death of Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes (1962)
We often think of Fuentes’ masterpiece as a novel of the Mexican Revolution, 1910 to 1921, although dates for revolutions are arbitrary since the reverberations seem interminable and unremitting.

The timeline of the novel runs from 1889 to 1960 to give the reader a perspective on the Mexican character. Fuentes uses rotating characters to demonstrate “the complexities of a human or national personality.”

Carlos Fuentes is to Mexico what García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa are to Colombia, Argentina, and Peru, respectively. He was, and still is, one of the most admired writers in Mexico, with distinguished recognition worldwide.

It was often thought he deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, but like so many venerable writers (Philip Roth, Javier Marías, Salman Rushdie) he was somehow overlooked.

Women: Women Talking by Miriam Toews (2018)
This daring story, based on fact, tells of the courage of women in a Mennonite community who decide to determine their own future and that of their children after suffering abuse from the men in power. The actual incident took place in a Mennonite community in Bolivia.

The novel was transformed into a successful and tense movie (2022) despite the fact that the action is solely women talking. The detailed depiction of the women is at the core of the book, and the perfect and precise casting contributes to the success of the movie. Directed by Sarah Polley, Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, and Clare Foy dominate the screen with their superb skills.

India: Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie (1981)
After a hundred years or more of struggle for independence from Britain, India was partitioned into the new states of Pakistan and India in 1947, a haphazard and tragic map devised by the British. While the former “colony” was finally free from British rule, in the years that followed perhaps even more blood was shed amongst Muslims and Hindus in the chaos that ensued after partition.

Enter Salem, a boy born with a powerful gift of telepathy at the precise hour in 1947 that India was freed from British rule. Thus another surrealistic tale from the master of storytelling begins.

With magical realism, the formidable Rushdie gives us a history of family and country during the havoc and muddling of the authorities in the years following 1947.

Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981. In addition, it was awarded the “Booker of Bookers” Prize in both 1993 and 2008, celebrating the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the Booker Prize. Unfortunately, Rushdie was once again overlooked for the Nobel Prize this year.

Next month: My favorite reads of 2023.

Huatulco

The Afterlife and the Mexican Revolution

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By Randy Jackson

Concepts of the afterlife have shaped culture and behavior throughout human history, from the building of the Pyramids of Egypt, to the celebration of Día de los Muertos today. Whatever we think the afterlife is “like,” including the materialist concept of no afterlife at all, influences our worldview and how we interact with other people.

From Heaven and Hell to Spiritism

Western thought regarding the afterlife has evolved through time. The concepts of Heaven and Hell did not exist in early Christianity. Christian dogma evolved from the belief in an afterlife of deep sleep until the final judgment at the end of time. Over the centuries Heaven and Hell became eternal rewards or punishments based on the conduct of humans during their time on earth. This concept remained foundational through the centuries. Then in the late 1800’s, a movement that became known as Spiritism (Spiritualism in the U.S.), arose first in Europe and spread throughout the world, particularly among the elite and educated classes. Spiritism held a belief that the afterlife was a continuity of individual consciousness, a concept similar to Eastern religious thought. Spiritism also held the concept that spirits in the afterlife could be communicated with.

One adherent of this view was Francisco Madero, the elected president of Mexico after the downfall of Porfirio Díaz. Madero may have channeled the spirit of Benito Juárez for advice in the early days of the Mexican Revolution.

Madero and the Rise of Spiritism

For a variety of reasons, Spiritism flourished in popularity around the turn of the 20th century. A turn away from the orthodoxy of mainstream religion was a particularly strong cause in the United States. New religions, such as Mormonism and the Seventh Day Adventist Church, were founded in this period, in what is known as the “Second Great Awakening,” a religious revival movement in the U.S. (c. 1795-1835). (The original “Great Awakening” was similar and started in Great Britain, flourishing in the colonies from the 1730s-1770s.)

Another factor that moved western thought towards a different view of the afterlife was the groundbreaking publication in 1859 of “The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin. The acceptance that life arose on earth through a natural process rather than divine creation was an intellectual paradigm shift that is still reverberating today. Spiritism, fully embracing evolution as a concept, holds that evolution of individual consciousness continues in the afterlife.

The spiritual beliefs of Francisco Madero were consistent with these concepts. Francisco Ignacio Madero González (1873-1913) was from one of the wealthiest Mexican families of the time. He was educated in France and the United States. In the international educated elite circles where Madero moved, the concepts of Spiritism were widely held. The Spiritist held that there were seven hierarchical realms in the afterlife; Spiritism postulated lower “hell-like” realms, up to realms very much like our physical realm, through to higher angelic realms, and ultimately a realm where individual consciousness (the soul) merged with the divine.

This afterlife view of Spiritism, in which individual consciousness can evolve to higher realms, is fundamentally intertwined with the concept of reincarnation. But reincarnation back into our physical realm wasn’t seen as something that happened immediately. Rather, there is time between lives where spirits are believed to exist in the afterlife realm of their evolutionary attainment. This “between lives” period of the afterlife enables mediums to connect to the spirit of the deceased. In the case of Madero’s mediumship, most of his initial contact, he believed, was with his younger brother Raul, who had died at age three.

In 2011 (paperback 2014), C.M. Mayo published Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. In numerous interviews about the work, she makes the point that Madero’s spiritual beliefs are fundamental in understanding the motivations and actions of the person who is credited with initiating the Mexican Revolution.

Madero’s Spiritism and the Mexican Revolution

In 1908, Madero published La sucesión presidencial en 1910, after the long-serving president and dictator, Porfirio Díaz announced in an interview with American journalist James Creelman, that Mexico was ready for democracy and that he would retire in 1910. Díaz subsequently changed his mind, Madero organized the anti-reelection opposition, Díaz had Madero imprisoned, and proceeded to rig the election for yet another term. Madero escaped from prison and while residing in San Antonio, Texas, wrote a manifesto, the “Plan of San Luis Potosí,” considered the founding document of the Mexican Revolution. (Recall that the Mexican Revolution was more of a series of regional conflicts than a clear war; it might have ended in 1917, with the establishment of the Mexican Constitution, but fighting continued on for years.) Madero’s writing led to the overthrow of Porfirio Díaz and Madero’s winning the interim presidential election of 1911.

Historians have given Francisco Madero a couple of significant titles: “Apostle of Democracy” and “Father of the Revolution.” He has been frequently described as having been a decent and honest man. In 2013, Michael Benjamin Amoruso, a doctoral student at the University of Texas in Austin, published a paper for the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, “A Transcendental Mission: Spiritism and the Revolutionary Politics of Francisco I. Madero, 1900-1911.” (The author is now an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Occidental University in Los Angeles). Amoruso argued that Madero “understood his political action as the earthly component of spiritual struggle.” Madero expresses a

prescriptive Spiritist vision, in which democracy represents a triumph of human’s “higher nature” over the “base, selfish passions” of Porfirio Díaz and his regime.

In his memoir, Madero wrote that beings in the afterlife instructed him in moral and spiritual matters. The political documents that launched the ousting of Porfirio Díaz were likely channeled from a source noted by Madero as “Jose.” Other journals from his channeled works were noted as being from “BJ,” considered by some to be Benito Juárez, the president of Mexico who preceded Porfirio Díaz.

Madero’s beliefs and practices of Spiritism were not a secret in Mexican society of the time. There were cartoons in Mexico City newspapers lampooning the president performing seances; the press described Madero as a “loco que se comunicaba con los muertos” (a madman who talks with the dead). In 1913, a segment of the army rebelled against Madero, and General Victoriano Huerta joined them. Huerta had risen to General under Porfirio Díaz, and Madero apparently did not completely trust him but felt he needed him.

The rebellion resulted in a coup d’etat – aided by the U.S. – against Madero; Huerta had Madero and his Vice-President, José María Pino Suárez, murdered in an alley within the week. Madero was 39; Suárez 44. The New York weekly newspaper The Sun trumpeted huge headlines: “MADERO AND SUAREZ SHOT DEAD ON WAY TO PRISON.” Madero’s overthrow and execution seemed to have nothing to do with his beliefs in the evolution of individuals across lifetimes towards a selfless growth in divine love. His fate was rather a raw power grab by Huerta.

I can’t imagine that Madero and Huerta ended up in the same realm in anyone’s version of the afterlife.

Email: box95jackson@gmail.com

Huatulco

Into The Stretch: Year-End 2023 Notable Novels

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By Carole Reedy

Catch up on your reading now, because the last few months of this year are filled with new works from our favorite writers.

But who’s missing? Donna Tartt fans are combing the web in search of her next book. It seems she publishes one every ten years: 1992, The Secret History; 2002, The Little Friend; 2013, The Goldfinch. 2023? Tartt’s novels are long and lush with unforgettable plots that twist and turn. They always feature vivid characters and an imaginative writing style that captures the reader from the start. My search for her next work has been unsuccessful as of this writing.

In better news, here’s a selection of new books that have been published or will soon be during the second half of 2023. This list includes some of my favorite writers and, judging from your messages to me, yours too.

Provocatively, there are three books of short stories on this list. I consider myself and readers of this column literary novel admirers, but these brilliant collections just may just have turned my head.

Crook Manifesto: A Novel, by Colson Whitehead
Second book in the Harlem Trilogy

This is Whitehead’s second novel in his Harlem Trilogy. While you can enjoy Crook Manifesto on its own, for maximum pleasure take time to read Harlem Shuffle (2021) first. I like to call the Trilogy Whitehead’s love story to Harlem. This second novel takes place in 1976 as the bicentennial celebrations are in full swing. However, it’s business as usual for crooked politicians and the manipulation of the poor and disadvantaged by up-and-coming “wannabes.”

Ray Carney, everyone’s favorite furniture vendor, seems to find himself once again in the midst of the machinations of less-than-savory company, including a shady candidate for political office who is ironically actively supported by Ray’s wife Elizabeth. Ray’s family has a welcome presence in this second book, and we hope will again in the third.

Delightfully dark and mysterious characters, though tinted with affection, sprinkle the text. This is Whitehead’s magic: he gives us the harsh reality of Harlem from the inside out. He goes to the heart of the city, as well as to the heart of his characters, offering a glimpse into the soul of the ‘hood and the denizens who struggle there daily.

Zero-Sum: Stories, by Joyce Carol Oates
Despite more than 100 extant novels, short story collections, nonfiction books, and essays, Oates delivers every year new creations to equal and even surpass her past successes.

Oates is audacious and intrepid, conveying that which often goes unsaid. Her latest collection does just that with a wide range of characters, emotions, and settings in place and time.

The most memorable of these is a story called “The Suicide,” told from the point of view of the one attempting to commit it. He mesmerizes us with his confusion, determination, apprehension, and pain.

Three other stories especially will remain with us and even haunt our dreams. We who have experienced a pandemic now have visions of our future world. Oates delivers a triad of stories about the future years of our planet. Need I say more?

Cravings: Stories, by Garnett Kilberg Cohen
Garnett Cohen popped into my life several years when a Chicago friend gifted me her novella, How We Move the Air (2010). A collection of seven linked stories, it was an unusual and stunning read in many ways, leaving me craving (no pun intended) more from this author. Since then I’ve religiously read Cohen’s collections of short stories as well as her individual works published in a diverse range of magazines. I and my band of avid readers highly recommend her short story collection Swarm to Glory (2014).

Through the details of everyday life, Cohen opens up a character’s world. The slightest phrase evokes a flood of emotions. At one point I felt, “This author knows me; I feel this way too.” There is good variety in the selection of these stories: they’ll make you laugh, cry, or just sigh. Like Joyce Carol Oates, she can be dauntless, an admirable and necessary quality in a writer.

Thoughts of Proust and involuntary memory come to mind when reading these stories. From the end of “Hors d’oeuvres,” the first story: “Our memories travel with us over the years, popping up when least expected.” As an avid traveler, I love to think of my memories traveling with me, at home and abroad.

I would have liked to point to my favorite story from the collection, but I can’t. I admired them all, each in its own way.

Roman Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Many of us were crushed a few years ago when Lahiri announced she was moving to Italy to write and publish her future books in Italian. This endeavor proved successful, and we’ve now been rewarded for our patience. Lahiri has created an homage, a collection of short stories where the main personage is the magical city of Rome. She wrote these stories in Italian and translated them to English with Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz.

Kirkus gives the collection a starred review, praising this new work from a veteran writer: “A brilliant return to the short story by an author of protean accomplishments … filled with intelligence and sorrow, these sharply drawn glimpses of Roman lives create an impressively unified effect.”

This is Lahiri’s first short story collection since she published Unaccustomed Earth in 2008.

It’s also appropriate to mention here Lahiri’s first novel written in Italian, which she then translated into English. Called Whereabouts (2021), it consists of 46 chapters, or rather entries into a diary, that are one woman’s reflections on her life. Highly praised by critics and a definite thumbs-up from me.

Baumgartener, by Paul Auster
One never knows what to expect from this icon whose repertoire over 38 years always surprises and never disappoints. His range of subject matter is vast, as are the style and breadth of his 18 novels.

This newest asks, “Why do we remember certain moments in our lives and not others?” The protagonist is a soon-to-be retired philosophy professor and phenomenologist. Auster’s prose takes us on a literary journey with characters Sy Baumgartner, his dead wife Anna, and his Polish-born father, a dressmaker and revolutionary.

This is his first novel since the extraordinary 4 3 2 1: A Novel was published in 2017.

Recently, Siri Hustvedt, Auster’s renowned philosopher/author wife, posted on Instagram that Auster is suffering from cancer and being treated with chemotherapy and infusions. As a fan since 1972, this news breaks my heart.

Day, by Michael Cunningham
It’s difficult to contemplate writer Michael Cunningham without conjuring up thoughts of an equally imposing author, the illustrious Virginia Woolf. Cunningham resurrected the memory of Virginia Woolf with his Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours: A Novel (2019). In The Hours, Cunningham relates moments in the life of Woolfe through three separate characters and stories. It is a tour de force that will haunt you long after you finish it.

In his newest novel, Cunningham takes us through three days (April 5 in 2019, 2020, and 2021) in the lives of a New York family.

The highest praise comes from another famous writer, Colum McCain (Let the Great World Spin, 2009) “Michael Cunningham crafts a glorious sentence, and at the same time he tells an achingly compelling story that speaks precisely to the times we live in. And it all flows so damn gorgeously that at times you just want to suspend the sacred day itself and hold it close, never let it, or the characters, go.”

The Bee Sting: A Novel, by Paul Murray
Rave reviews everywhere. Long waitlists at the library that include yours truly. The Los Angeles Times calls it a masterpiece, saying “it ought to cement Murray’s already high standing…it’s a triumph of realist fiction, a big, sprawling social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The agility with which Murray structures the narrative around the family at its heart is virtuosic and sure-footed, evidence of a writer at the height of his power deftly shifting perspectives, style and syntax to maximize emotional impact. Hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful.”

Plus a sneak preview …

March 2024
James, by Percival Everett
Move over Demon Copperhead, James is coming. Everett reworks Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 in the UK, 1885 in the US) in this most anticipated novel. We’ll be eager to see if he can accomplish what Barbara Kingsolver was able to achieve in her brilliant and award-winning novel Demon Copperhead: A Novel (2022), which possesses the bones and heart of the beloved Dickens classic David Copperfield.

Percival Everett’s most recent books include Dr. No: A Novel (2022, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees: A Novel (2021, finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), and Telephone (2021, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize).

Huatulco

Editor’s Letter

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By Jane Bauer

“When we name an inanimate object, we are intentionally building a relationship, elevating it to a character in our lives. Not only do we feel closer to things that we name, but perhaps we name our things in order to feel closer to them.”
Kathryn Hymes in The Atlantic

Words. Where would we be without them? We marvel at a baby’s first words- usually little more than a gurgle, we learn the names of objects, we learn to read, we learn to manipulate and interpret their meanings and along the way we take them for granted, until the day when we start losing them one by one.

In translation, beyond word substitution, there are gaps of meaning within languages. We’ve all heard about how some tribes in the Arctic have 50 words for snow. There are other languages that have words that give more specific meaning to things, such as the German word Treppenwitz which translates to stairs (treppen) + wit- and means “the perfect retort that comes too late”, what you didn’t respond in the heat of the moment because you only thought of it while you were already leaving. I need at least seven English words to describe what this German word captures with one. By the way it’s a noun, in case you were wondering how to integrate it into your speech. German is full of amazing compound words like Lebensmüde, which means “life-tired”.

In Iceland they have Gluggaveður – which describes when the weather looks pleasant from your window, but is actually really cold and you need a jacket. Gluggaveður literally means “window-weather”.

One of my favorite words is the Japanese Komorebi, which refers to the scattered sunlight that filters through the leaves on the trees. So poetic and gentle feeling. What do you think… noun or adjective? If you are a native English speaker I bet you guessed it is an adjective because it feels so descriptive. It is actually a noun which makes it even cooler because it is a thing, it has form, it’s more than a description- it’s a slice of a moment and the Japanese have captured it with a word, naming it gives it heft.

This month our writers explore the naming of things. On the surface this topic feels flat but it is anything but. Naming is the first act bestowed upon us when we are born. Attaching words to things, people and emotions is how we find our place in the world and give form to our experiences. In fact, naming is such serious business that many countries have regulations regarding naming. In Mexico, in the state of Sonora, the name Hermione is banned, as is the name Robocop. Sarah is a banned name in Morocco, although without the ‘h’ it is permissible. Linda is banned in Saudi Arabia due to its association with Western culture.

Names have so much power. In Harry Potter there is He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Judaism avoids mentioning G-d other than when reading the torah. This is because he is thought to transcend the word as no word can capture the essence of G-d.

And for when you start forgetting the names of things or people, the Hawaiian language has Pana Po’o – the act of scratching your head in an attempt to remember something you’ve forgotten.

See you next month,

Jane

Huatulco

What’s in a Name?

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By Randy Jackson

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet professes her love for Romeo despite the underlying feud between their families, by saying: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In saying this, Juliet expresses the notion that the name of something is of less importance than the underlying thing the name is referring to. This might be true for the beloved Romeo, he would still be the person Juliet loved even if his family name (Montague) were something else. But if names, more broadly words, have little to no meaning in relation to that which the word is referring to, then what of mantras, prayers, or even magic spells? Would any choice of words get the same results?

“Abracadabra” is a word we are all familiar with. In modern times, this word is associated with a campy version of magic, as when a rabbit is pulled from a hat. But its origin is far more serious. “Abracadabra” was first recorded in the Liber Medicinalis (Medical Book) by Serenus Sammonicus, a tutor and physician to the Roman Emperor, Geta (Publius Septimius Geta), around 200 CE. It was a medical incantation to cure certain illnesses. The treatment involved intoning “abracadabra” while inscribing it so that it could be worn as an amulet for eleven days which, it was believed, would cure the patient.

There is some thought that “abracadabra” is much older, handed down from the Aramaic (as early as the 11th century BC) to Hebrew; in that scenario, it would be roughly translated as “It will be created in my words,” “I create what I speak,” or perhaps – in the Hebrew – “It came to pass as it was spoken”; in any event, all the meanings had to do with the connection between the word and the creation of a reality. Indeeed, the word was still being used in the 13th century, inscribed above London doorways to ward off the plague.

In today’s world, the notion that words or sounds have some power to affect physical reality seems ludicrous to many. But this, I think, is shortsighted. To start, one would have to dismiss the solid research on the placebo effect, which, according to Harvard Medical School’s online magazine Harvard Health (2021) can range between 30% and 60% effective in a certain range of conditions. If the placebo effect is to “work,” the patient has to believe they are receiving treatment. To me, it doesn’t seem that much of a leap from someone receiving an amulet with “abracadabra” written on it in the 3rd century to a patient today who receives a sugar pill from a doctor in a white coat.

“Abracadabra” had particular meaning(s), based on the context, in the distant past, but it has a different meaning to us today. It is the meaning of a word to the person who hears it that fastens a name to an object (or concept) it refers to. In the classic science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), author Walter M. Miller, Jr., describes a post-apocalyptic world where monks study an artifact for its spiritual significance. This artifact is in fact a contemporary grocery shopping list: “Pound Pastrami” has a different meaning after a nuclear holocaust than it would have had to a sandwich maker in 1959.

So, what’s in a name?

Our meaning of things. Romeo Montague is the guy Juliet loves, a rose is a beautiful flower with a delightful scent, and Sarah Palin™ (yup, she trademarked her name), is, well, Sarah Palin. Names hold our understanding of the objects they represent. Although it is possible to talk about names as being separate from the object or concepts they represent, we cannot talk about an object without using “its” name. Names (with the help of a few other types of words, like verbs) are how we transmit our thoughts to others. So … there’s a LOT in a name.

Then there’s the universal meditation mantra of “OM” (pronounced ah-uu-mm). Not a name per se, but it is still a sound we make to express something. “OM” is thus in a different category of sounds we make than those we call “names” or “words.” Names/words are the sounds we make to collectively understand the structure of our world. This is a “rock,” that is a “cup,” and we call that guy “Romeo.” “OM” is different. It is our imitation of a sound that in most Eastern religions is thought to represent the sound of the universe. By our vocalization of this sound, we seek something beyond the collective understanding of our structured world view.

Through our meanings of names like “rock,” “cup,” and “Romeo,” we lock down the structure of our perceived world, creating our reality. “OM” and other mantras are our attempt to reach beyond our reality, to understand something more. How could we puny humans with a bit of air passing over our vocal cords vibrate the sound of the universe? Well, maybe that’s all we’ve got. We use our vocal cords to name, structure, and communicate our reality, so why not use it to call upon the universe? Then to answer Juliet’s question about what’s in a name – everything, Juliet, everything.

Huatulco

Book Titles: “What’s in a Name?”

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By Carole Reedy

Myriad factors enter into the success and sales of a book: the popularity and marketing reach of the author, the book’s jacket and design, the reviews, length, friends’ recommendations, and, of course, the subject, style, and focus.

Add to that list the title of the book.

Authors generally prefer to create their own titles, but since publishers take part in the financial risk and success of the book, they, too, have input. Based on market research, a publisher may have a better insight into reader expectations than the author. Of course, a well-established, proven-popular author may have more influence in the final decision than an unknown writer.

Authors themselves may change their title decisions as the process of publication proceeds. Usually, the author starts with a working title but is certainly not wedded to it. Books go through several metamorphoses before the final sentence is penned, so honing the working title is likely.

Titles can reflect the subject and general ambience of a book. They can be clever, funny, explanatory, or express a feeling. The title is the first thing a reader sees or hears and is significant in swaying a reader to purchase and read a book.

To understand the process of choosing a title, let’s look at actual titles of famous novels to understand how they were named and even re-named.

Often authors derive their titles from other sources familiar to their readers. The most popular seem to be the Bible, Shakespeare, poetry, popular phrases within or outside the book, or the names of particular characters. The idea is to attract attention to the book by conveying the essence of the book and the intentions of author in a succinct phrase.

Inspired by the Bible

The Grapes of Wrath, the title of John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is a reference to a passage in the Book of Revelations that reads, “So the angel swung his sickle to the earth and gathered the clusters from the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God.”

The title is also a phrase from the first stanza of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the lyrics penned by Julia Ward Howe in 1861 to what was until then a military marching song called “John Brown’s Body.”

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

The title was suggested by Steinbeck’s wife Carol, and the author deemed it a worthy choice.

The title East of Eden, another Steinbeck novel (1952), is a symbolic re-creation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel woven into a history of California’s Salinas Valley, a popular location for Steinbeck’s novels. The title refers to Genesis 4:16: “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the east of Eden” (King James Version).

Inspired by Shakespeare

The title Remembrance of Things Past, the approximately 1,250,000-word novel by Marcel Proust, could also fall into our “Inspired by Poetry” category below. The first English translation of the title (by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 1922) was derived from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

Proust wrote his 1913 seven-volume masterpiece in French, with the title À la recherche du temps perdu, which more directly translates into In Search of Lost Time. Proust did not approve of Moncrieff’s, title although he made no attempt to change it. He felt it did not accurately convey his intended meaning of memory as involuntary rather than voluntary. Proust did, however, praise Moncrieff’s translation of the first volume, Swann’s Way, possibly the only praise he ever handed out to a translator of his works.

The working title David Foster Wallace originally used for his thousand-page magnum opus Infinite Jest (1996) was A Failed Entertainment. The novel is partly based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the ultimate title refers to Act V, Scene 1, when Hamlet holds up the skull of the court jester Yorick and says

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is!”

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (1962; film version 1983) is a dark fantasy novel featuring two 13-year-old best friends and their nightmarish experience with a carnival. The title is taken from MacBeth Act 4, Scene 1, when the witches predict the outcome of the play:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.

A most appropriate title for Bradbury’s novel, as it teeters between fantasy and horror. On his 80th birthday, Bradbury enjoyed the writing process as much as ever before. “The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was 12.”

Inspired by Character Names

J.K. Rowling named the first book of her blockbuster Harry Potter series Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Scholastic, the publisher, felt children might reject a book with the word “philosopher” in the title and changed it to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1998).

The Great Gatsby (1925) was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg by the author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The publisher thought the title too obscure (Trimalchio was a character in the Satyricon of Petronius, a Roman writer in the late 1st century CE), and suggested a change. All agreed, and the book came to become one of the most beloved pieces of American literature.

Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The perfect title for this classic stream-of-conscious masterpiece written by Virginia Woolf, which takes place one day in 1923 in the life of the title character. The working title for the book was The Hours.

Fifty years later author Michael Cunningham wrote a highly regarded novel with exactly that title. It relates the stories of three different women – Virginia Woolf, on the day in 1923 she starts writing Mrs. Dalloway; Laura Brown, a depressed American housewife who is reading Mrs. Dalloway in 1949; and Clarissa Vaughn, who (sometime in the 1980s or 90s) is hosting a party to celebrate her friend Richard, a poet and novelist who has just received a lifetime achievement award but is dying of AIDS.

The film The Hours, starring Meryl Streep as Clarissa Vaughn, came out in 2002 (a British film titled Mrs. Dalloway was released in 1997, is a faithful retelling of the book and starred Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway); The Hours was turned into an opera by composer Kevin Puts; it debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in November 2022.

Charles Dickens (1812-70) is known for colorful characters in his trove of novels and writings. His unique style incorporated linguistic technique to invent characters whose actions were reflected in their names (Mr. Bumble, Scrooge).

In all, Dickens created 989 characters, and many more individuals, for his books. No wonder he titled many of his works with the main character. Among those are some of his most beloved works: Nicolas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Little Dorrit, Barnaby Rudge, and Edwin Drood.

Inspired by Phrases (often from the text of the book) and/or general theme

Ayn Rand at first chose the title The Strike for her monumental classic novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), her last and longest book and one she considered her magnum opus. However, she thought perhaps that title revealed too much. Her husband actually suggested the title we know, which refers to a conversation between two of her characters. One personage notes that the greater the effort Atlas made, the heavier the world became and the best one can do is “to shrug.”

Faith Martin’s DI Hillary Greene series, about a British detective who lives on a narrowboat, originally had “Narrow” in all the titles: A Narrow Escape, On the Straight and Narrow, Narrow Is the Way, etc., but the titles were changed when a new publisher took over. In place of “Narrow,” the word “Murder” was used to reassure the readers they were getting a murder mystery (Murder on the Oxford Canal [2004], Murder of the Bride [2006], etc.) The new titles seem to be selling better than the originals.

Inspired by Poetry

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934; film version 1962, TV mini-series 1985), is the fourth and final novel by the formidable jazz-age writer. It was not well-received by critics at the time, but time proved them wrong. The title comes from John Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale”:

Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1874; film versions, 1967, 2015, among others) bears a title drawn from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1750), which was inspired at least in part by the death of the poet Richard West in 1742:

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

In a review of the 2015 film (The Guardian, April 15, 2014), British writer and journalist Lucasta Miller tells us that the title of the book is an ironic literary joke; in his poem, Gray is idealizing noiseless and sequestered calm, whereas Hardy “disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of an extreme plot … he is out to subvert his readers’ complacency.” (Note that “madding” means “frenzied” in this context.)

When the Title Comes First

Many authors have the title for their book ready before they start writing. In the words of Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book of the same name. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.” Beloved Irish author Frank McCourt is supposed to have said – perhaps about his memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996; film version 1999), “I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.”

To close on a lighter note, here’s a quote from everyone’s favorite humor writer, Dave Barry: “It isn’t easy, coming up with book titles. A lot of the really good ones are taken. Thin Thighs in 30 Days, for example. Also, The Bible.”